by: William Abner

I recently sat in on a conference call with Jack Scalici, director of creative production, 2K Games to get some last minute information on Mafia II. Rather than bore you with a recount of everything that was said, let’s instead break it down into bite sized chunks with the highlights from the call as I still find a shocking number of the questions asked completely pointless. There was some good, stuff, though.

• The main reason, it turns out, for the long stretch between Mafia and Mafia II is because building a brand new engine takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Also, consider that the game was originally designed for last generation consoles and then all of that had to be scrapped and you are left with an eight year gap.

• If there’s one feature that didn’t make the cut that the team wished did – it’s the lack of cool melee weapons. While they like the melee system, who wouldn’t like a good garrote or baseball bat?

• The infamous script started off as 500 pages, then ballooned to 800 and then came back down to 700. The voice acting is a high point, according to Scalici, and they intentionally shy from using “name” actors because when you hear a famous actor you can’t help but think “that’s the guy!” I took this as a reference to Mass Effect 2 and Martin Sheen but maybe I was reading too much into it.

• The biggest obstacle? Developing a great game engine to work on PC and consoles.